P.T. Barnum once said, “Money is a terrible master but an excellent servant.” When money overpowers you, you don’t sleep. You feel constantly insecure, fearful, resentful, and out of control. You can’t help but grow in bitterness, comparing your own hard knocks to the perceived wealth and ease of others. Being mastered by money is misery.

To overpower the concept and the beast that is “money”—regardless of how much you have—is to bring it to heel, alongside you. To put it to work in favor of your security rather than letting it stand between you and contentedness. Being a master of money is freedom.

These are extraordinary times. The world is in perpetual conflict. Inflation is rampant, the supply chain is unreliable, and many among our population seems to have lost the will to work—all exacerbated by our government’s pandemic response. We see the sum effect in the price of every gallon of gas, carton of milk, or pound of butter.

For solo parents living on a single income, it’s a daily battle. It’s weighing what we can and can’t afford and seeing the second column grow with no end in sight.

Comedian Chris Rock grew up poor and became wealthy. He defines abundance as not having a lot of money, but about having “a lot of options.” And that’s why we don’t sleep when mastered by money. It’s not only being out of money, as true as that may be. It’s the tension of being out of options and raising kids in that vacuum.

Today, we’re going to talk about an options-rich mentality. Stretching, focusing, and shifting priorities to counter extraordinary times.

Taking Inventory

Regaining control over money is a practice of handling what you have with intention in two ways:

● Head knowledge: be proactive, energized, and deliberate in managing your income and expenses
● Heart knowledge: contemplate how you feel when you talk about and deal with your money

Most of us evade the practical details because of how money makes us feel. We carry deep trepidation and shame. It’s tangled up with our self-narrative: that we are or are not successful or talented, that we are or are not a good partner or worthy of love or regard.

Financial chaos does follow relationship chaos. That’s the reality we all face. Divorce, broken relationships, loss, or a co-parent’s decisions impacts you and your kids. Some of us take on that chaos, internalizing it as negative conclusions about us and our failures. But there is a choice: we can reckon with money, or we can let money reckon with us. We can get organized.

According to Dave Ramsey, financial expert and author of Total Money Makeover, your finances are only 20% head knowledge and 80% your behavior. Or, as Walt Disney put it: “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.”

We don’t need to be experts. We don’t need to read a hundred books or understand the stock market. We only need to prioritize financial awareness and set some goals.

Head knowledge is the straightforward beginning. Set your feelings aside and roll up your sleeves to assess the money you’ve got coming in, and the money going out. The heart takes a cue from the head. The more empowered you are—no longer burying your head in the sand—the calmer you can be in your feelings about money (and, thus, your feelings about yourself). And the more you change your behavior, the more you see rewards—a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Talking about money and facing the reality of your financial situation is hard. You may be reluctant to come face-to-face with past wounds and current anxieties. “Out of sight, out of mind” feels better in the short term, but only digs the hole deeper in the long term. If you had a time machine, we’d say there’s no better time to get organized around money than years ago. But you don’t. So there’s no better time than right now.